


thanks for the memories, mistletoe

by Smudge



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Fake Relationship, Mistletoe, bed sharing, better let betty do it, if you're gonna con a sweet old lady, mistaken holiday card no-no's, tropes!, unadulterated fluffyfest, winter prompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 12:25:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17059730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smudge/pseuds/Smudge
Summary: It starts with Betty’s faith in his ability to drive them through a snowstorm.It ends with Betty’s ability to get them out of the situation they’ve gotten themselves into.Or, in other words, Betty and Jughead have an adventure that turns out really well for the both of them.





	thanks for the memories, mistletoe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [IndieBughead](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IndieBughead/gifts).



> Helloooo! This is for the winter prompts Maria gave me. 
> 
> See, Maria? I did it. Even if I took some liberties with it. Love you, promise. 
> 
> Let's all be proud of me. And also, enjoy the tropes, y'all!

It starts with Betty’s faith in his ability to drive them through a snowstorm.

It ends with Betty’s ability to get them out of the situation they’ve gotten themselves into.

 _Why does she always let me drive home, every year?_ he thinks, trying to get control of the adrenaline making his heart pound.

“Really, Jug?” Betty asks, bewildered by the fishtailing spin that puts them in a ditch on the side of the road after dark.

Reaching across the middle console of the car he turns her chin to the side, worrying that she might have hit the side of her head on the passenger window. “Are you okay?”

Betty is fussing with his jacket, trying to see if he’s the one who might have gotten hurt when she finally answers him. “I’m fine. Are you alright?”

Relaxing back into the driver’s seat he just lets his head fall to the side. “I’m fine. I don’t think the car is, though.”

“It’ll be fine, I’m sure.”

Not so sure, Jughead tries to reverse the still running car out of the snowbank they’d run into with no success. “Dammit.”

He hears Betty take a deep breath. The one he knows means she’s trying to calm herself down before taking charge of the situation.

“Maybe there’s a gas station or something around here close?” she asks with hopeful eyes.

Having been asleep right before he spun out of control, she’s not even aware of where they are. Shaking his head at her, her face falls in disappointment before squaring her shoulders and unbuckling her seat belt.

Jughead goes to put his hand over hers to stop her when he asks, “What are you doing?”

“We have cell phones, Jug. Maybe there’s something within walking distance we can find on the maps. Let’s go.”

Turning the car off and unbuckling his own seat belt with a grimace, he follows Betty out into the dark night, the snow only making it marginally brighter than usual when he hears her opening the trunk.

“You don’t think we’ll be back soon?”

Betty shrugs at him, grabbing her bag before handing him his. “I don’t know but I don’t want to take the chance and not have our bags.”

Slamming the trunk shut and following her as she looks down at her phone screen he takes her bag out of her hand, Betty giving him a grateful smile before turning back to her phone.

“It says there’s a bed and breakfast about a quarter mile east of here,” she informs him, pointing in the direction he assumes must be east.

“Lead on, Macduff,” he says, gesturing for her to walk ahead of him.

Betty raises an eyebrow at him but continues walking ahead. “That’s a misquote, you know. It’s “Lay on, Macduff” not lead on.”

He swallows the swell of affection that rises in him at her going into lecturing and editing mode. Knowing he probably shouldn’t be attracted to it but finding himself helpless to fight it, he just winks at her as he catches up, both of them trudging through the snow in what he hopes is actually east.

It takes them what feels like hours but in reality was probably no more than forty five minutes to get to the front door of the B&B, Betty knocking on the door, straightening her shoulders and putting on her best smile before the door opens.

The older couple that usher them into the foyer of the B&B are looking them up and down, taking them both in before the woman asks, “Were you all walking through this weather?”

Setting the bags on the ground, Jughead gives her a nod. “Yeah, our car is stuck in a ditch about a quarter mile away from here.”

“Do you think there are any towing companies open now?” Betty questions in a sweet voice. The kind he knows she uses to get what she wants when she’s not sure of how helpful the person will be. _Kill them with kindness, Juggie,_ she always tells him when he’s pissed off yet another professor or co-worker.

The man gives her an indulgent smile. “Nothing open around here this late at night. Where were you headed to?”

“Riverdale,” Jughead answers. The man gives a quick grimace in response to that.

 _Yeah, me too,_ he thinks. Probably not for the same reasons but the expression is identical to the one every time he packs for a trip home.

“That’s hours away from here, son,” the man commiserates, clapping a hand on his shoulder in sympathy as he walks by him, leaving them to the mercy of his wife.

“Oh,” Betty murmurs. “Well, do you have a room available for the night?”

“We do have one available but we don’t condone premarital sin, dear,” the woman says with a shrewd glance at the both of them, “so unless you and your young man here are-”

“Of course!” Betty exclaims, her hand on her heart in what Jughead thinks is for dramatic effect.

 _Thank god for winter gloves to cover our lies and apparent sinning,_ Jughead mentally huffs to himself, just barely suppressing an eyeroll.  

“Well that’s fine, then. I’d have hated to make him sleep on the sofa,” she chuckles, wrapping an arm around Betty’s shoulders, leading her down the same hallway her husband had already disappeared down.

Grabbing their bags, Jughead hurries after them just in case Betty was about to be lead into some sort of weird murder dungeon.

Walking through a doorway as he caught up to both women, his steps almost falter as he takes in the room. It’s covered in Christmas decorations. Every inch of the space looks like someone chewed on an elf until they split open, spewing holiday cheer on every surface in the room. There were two fully decorated trees. Two of them.

 _What the fuck,_ he says to himself before realizing he’s standing next to Betty in the large doorway.

“Carl, look!” the older woman whose name he probably should have gotten by now exclaims. Pointing at them, Betty and Jughead turn to look at each other before realizing they were standing under some mistletoe in their very own version of a _Winter Wonderhell._

“Oh Patricia, really?” Carl asks, fondly looking at his overexcited wife.

Ahh, Patricia. Carl. _There we go,_ he thinks as he’s about to take a step forward into what he thinks might be a living room. _Might_ be. He can’t tell with the copious amounts of Christmas decorations everywhere.

Patricia is right in front of Betty, taking her phone and gesturing at them to stand closer together before he realizes what’s happening he’s following Betty’s gaze to right above their heads and the mistletoe that’s hanging there.

Mocking him.

Taunting him.

 _Challenging_ him.

_Fuck you, mistletoe._

Meeting Betty’s wide eyes and pink cheeks he thinks about all the times he’s thought about kissing her. Which, these days, seems like a constant thing. In her dorm. In the car. A shared class, the library, walking down the street, at a coffee shop. The local diner that isn’t Pop’s but is a fairly good substitute. When they’re watching a movie and she falls asleep with her head on his shoulder.

The times she stays over studying and passes out on top of her books, making him carry her to his bed as he takes the couch. As she’s bleary eyed and begging for coffee on those morning afters. The insistent urge to turn his head as she kisses him on the cheek in thanks for whatever it is he’s done that she’s grateful for.

Of all his imagined kisses, under the mistletoe at an over decorated and overly conservative bed and breakfast hours away from their hometown never made the list.

“Wait!” Patricia exclaims. “Let me get a shot of you two for you to keep!”

Betty inhales sharply as she stares at him before whispering, “Are you okay with this?”

“What?” he asks, baffled by the insecure look on her face.

“Kissing me like this?”

“Well it’s not how I imagined it would be but I doubt it’ll kill me,” he informs her drolly, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her in closer to himself right before pressing his lips to hers, the beating of his heart going fast it feels like it’s bouncing around in his chest.  

Her lips are soft, the little gasp she makes that he breathes in from as he pulls in her lower lip between his, nipping it gently before letting it go.

Jughead thinks they both might be a little dazed when he snaps back to reality and looks down into her upturned face. “Uh-”

“Yeah,” Betty interrupts in agreement.

“Oh Carl, they remind me of us when we were their age. Stars in our eyes, I swear,” Patricia sighs happily as she hands Betty back her phone. “Come on now, let me show you to your room.”

Clearing his throat, he tries to maintain his sense of sanity as he lets his arm fall from around her waist and picks the bags up once more to follow Patricia through the doorway she’s walked through. Neither he or Betty say a word as they walk towards their room for the night.

 _Well,_ he decides, _this is a game changer._

Patricia, sweet and gullible Patricia, opens a door at the far end of a long hallways and gives them a beaming smile as she ushers them into the room. “Here you go, dears.”

“Thank you,” Betty says with the sweet smile that charmed every adult she’d ever had the need to con as they were growing up. Taking her gloves off slowly and stuffing them into her pockets so Patricia can’t see her bare ring finger, she gives him a conspiratorial smile.  

Jughead, setting their bags in the middle of the room, stops to look around the space and notices the warm comfortable atmosphere. The bright linens, the soft looking bed, a large picture window showing them the blanket of snow that was probably burying the car as he stands there.

“If you need anything, just holler okay?” Patricia tells them, walking back out the door, leaving them alone and unprepared to deal with what happened downstairs.

When he spins to face Betty and the unspoken tension he sees her smiling down at her phone.

“What?”

Her head snaps up, eyes wide. “Uh, nothing.”

“Really?”

“It’s just-” Betty shrugs and then shakes her head at herself, rolling her eyes as she hands him her phone. “It’s a cute picture, Jug.”

Glancing at the screen he’s taken aback by the image. They’re framed by the garland strung around the doorway with the evergreen of the mistletoe contrasting with the red ribbon it’s hanging from. You can’t see the bags sitting by their feet and both of their faces look content as they kiss, his arm wrapped around her back and her hand grabbing onto the lapel of his coat, seeming to pull him closer to her.

He wants to burn the image into his brain. He wants everyone to see it. Wants everyone to know that he kissed Betty Cooper and she kissed him _back._

Starting to mess with the image, he playfully puts his palm over the entirety of Betty’s face as she reaches to take her phone back, protesting that she doesn’t want him to delete it.

“I’m not deleting it,” he informs her as he finishes his task, handing the phone back to her with a smile. “See?”

Taking her phone, Betty looks down at the screen, a disbelieving laugh escaping her as she sees what he’s done.

“Jug!”

“What?”

“Oh my god,” Betty says, staring at him as her phone started sounding off with multiple notifications. “Look what you did.”

Peering at the screen over her shoulder, his own eyes widen. It was, he thought, an obvious joke.

“Shit.”

Posting the picture of them kissing with the caption, **_“Happy Holidays”_ ** for all of their friends and family to see suddenly doesn’t seem as funny as it was a minute ago.

“Juggie,” Betty groans out, “Veronica is-”

“I see that, yeah,” he laments with her. All he wanted was to do was share a little digital holiday card with everyone. And, okay, yes, he also wanted the proof that Betty kissed him out in the world but he didn’t think anyone would take it seriously.

He was wrong.

Her phone pinged again with another notification. He only saw a few of them, mostly from Veronica but they all held a variation of the same thing:

_OMG, B, finally!_

_I knew he’d cave eventually_

_You owe me money, Archiekins_

_Jug, you couldn’t have held out until Valentine’s Day? I owe Ronnie $20 now_

_Elizabeth Cooper, what is this?_

_Really, Jughead? You couldn’t take the hat off for one picture?_

_I want details, Betty, like, immediately_

“What are we gonna do?” Betty asks, wringing her hands as he keeps reading the comments that keep coming in.

At the sound of her distress, his stomach drops and he turns to her with an apologetic expression. “Betts, I’m sorry, I thought it would be funny.”

“I’m not mad, Jug,” she tells him, biting her lip as she stares up at him. “But how are we going to get them to believe it wasn’t serious?”

Shrugging, he tosses her phone onto a chair after turning it on silent. “We could, just, I don’t know, not tell them it’s not?”

She raises her eyebrows at him. “You want us to what? Fake date for our friends?”

“Why not? We’re already fake married for Carl and Patricia out there,” he says with a smile, putting his hands on her shoulders, giving them an affectionate squeeze as she laughs at him. “Or-”

“What?” she asks, meeting his eyes. Exasperated by his silence, she repeats herself. _“What?”_

Running his hands up and over her shoulders until they were resting on the curves of her neck, he leans down as he pulls her to him, pressing his lips to hers once more. Breaking the kiss faster than he had with the one downstairs, he focuses on her reaction.

Her eyes are still closed and her hands that came up to grab his jacket once more fell to her sides as she inhales deeply as she opens her eyes. He’s nervously getting ready to apologize to her when she throws herself at him, arms wrapping around his neck, tugging him down and into her as she meets his lips with her own.

Giving himself into the kiss, he lets her pull on him as she’s also pushing him, his arms moving to circle around her back, keeping her close to him as he tries to figure out what she wants him to do. After almost tripping over his own feet, he reluctantly breaks the kiss.  

“I don’t know what you’re trying to get me to do, Betty,” he says with a laugh, slightly out of breath.

Betty huffs and narrows her eyes at him. “I’ve been waiting for you to do that for way too long for me not to take advantage of the classic snowed in bed sharing scenario.”

 _Well that’s unexpected,_ he thinks right before reaching for her again, arms going around her waist, picking her up and she laughs as he tosses her on the bed, the extra bounce she takes knocking the giggles out of her as he pulls his jacket off, letting it drop as he tosses his hat on the table next to the bed.

Crawling up and over her, he lets some of his weight fall against her as he whispers, “It’d be a real shame to miss such an opportunity, wouldn’t it?”

“Tragic, really,” Betty softly replies, hands slipping up and into his hair.

“Better take advantage of it while we can,” he murmurs into the soft skin of her throat and the last coherent thought he has is being grateful for that ridiculous mistletoe, bad weather, and impulsive photo posting.

**Author's Note:**

> THE TROPES, YOU GUYS. 
> 
> Sigh. I love them. So do you, admit it. Come on. I know you do. Anyways, I hope you liked it, Maria! Sorry about the editing but you know, can't let you save me from myself if it's for you. Sad, I know. 
> 
> Besos to the rest of you! I adore you all and honestly would make out with each and every one of you under some mistletoe. True story. 
> 
> As always, you can come [tumble](https://thetaoofbetty.tumblr.com/) with me if you want.


End file.
